This invention relates to an optical character reader (OCR) used as a kind of input device for a word processor, an automatic translator and the like and more particularly to a multi-functional optical character reader with which not only characters within a specified target area of an input image but also its overall format can be studied.
Systems with an optical character reader capable of reading handwritten or printed originals as input device for a word processor, an automatic translator and the like have been considered such that alphanumeric, kana and kanji characters are scanned by a CCD scanner and read by a photoelectric converter device and patterns are recognized by a character recognition device. Such optical character readers have so far been adapted only to directly read and recognize characters on an input sheet and to transmit data thereon to an apparatus such as a word processor and the user could not edit input data with such an optical character reader.